Turnbull’s Sleight Of Hand On Clean Energy Investment

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has put his own stamp on clean energy investment in Australia, dumping Coalition plans to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, but announcing new plans to essentially de-fund the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and replace it with a new “Clean Energy Innovation Fund.”
The retention of the CEFC will be welcome and signals a potential shift from the anti-renewable policy stance of the Abbott regime that preceded him.
But the move to de-fund ARENA and create a “new” fund using money already allocated to the CEFC is nothing but a sleight of hand, and an elaborate ruse by Turnbull to save more than a $1.3 billion and get his new pet-word “innovation” included in a financing scheme. It may also be designed to meet Australia’s Paris commitment to invest “new money” in clean energy innovation.
But the move may back-fire, because although the new set-up will continue to support near commercial projects, the technologies and ideas at the formative stage of the innovation process may be left stranded, without funding. According to the former chairman of ARENA, Greg Bourne, Australian innovation may move overseas to get the necessary support. So much for the innovation nation.
The Turnbull government has been showing less interest in ARENA, and its cost to the budget, and over the last few months has not renewed contracts for directors, and allowed it to narrow to a single director, the head of Greg Hunt’s environment department.
ARENA will continue to manage its current projects, and complete its $100 million funding program for large scale solar projects. But after that its funding will be stopped and it will effectively be morphed – along with its staff – into an annexe of the CEFC and the new fund.
Under the new plan hatched by Turnbull and Hunt, ARENA’s grants-based funding strategy will be replaced by “innovative” finance such as debt and equity funding – effectively lending money and buying shares in the investments.
The remit under the new CEIF banner will also move beyond renewable energy and include energy efficiency, already a major focus of the CEFC, and “low carbon investment”.
Hunt said the CEIF will mostly invest in “storage, in new  battery technology, in smart  grids, in some of the exciting  solar visions that people have  hoped for and imagined for  Australia but which are only  now really becoming reality.” The sort of thing that ARENA was already doing, but may now happen under a fund rebranded by the Coalition.
The new fund will have $100 million a year to invest, but this money will come from funds already allocated to the CEFC. It is being drip fed over 10 years so as “not to overwhelm the market”.
The long term unallocated ARENA budget – amounting to around $1.3 billion – has been withdrawn. This, however, needs approval from parliament, and Turnbull may have a fight on his hands to achieve this once Labor and the Greens see through the proposal, unless it occurs in a joint sitting post a double dissolution.
The Coalition effectively killed ARENA’s unallocated $1.3 billion funding in last year’s budget, excluding it from the forward estimates. But if the Coalition wants that money to disappear completely it needs to change the act, and that will require support from the Senate.
Turnbull said the new fund would target early-stage clean energy projects that had trouble growing to the size and maturity needed to attract private equity. He cited one project that could be supported as the solar tower plus storage facility proposed for Port Augusta by US company SolarReserve.
“We are promoting innovation and new economic opportunities, enhancing our productivity, protecting our environment and reducing emissions to tackle climate change,’’ Turnbull said in a statement. “An example of a project could be a large scale solar facility with storage in Port Augusta.”
That comment drew  enthusiastic support from local community groups pushing for those solar towers – although less so from the CEFC itself. But again Turnbull appears to be giving with one hand and taking with another.
One major concern is the future of the “research” component of ARENA, which has been playing a critical role in providing data, information and knowledge on new technologies, such as grid integration, mapping solar and wind resources.

The Government will also set a target rate of return of one per cent above the government bond rate – compared to the CEFC’s target of 4 per cent above the government bond rate – effectively turning it into a venture capital fund, although one already exists in the form of the Southern Cross Ventures.
“We hope that they do better but that’s their target, so instead of giving  100 per cent of the taxpayers’ money  away, our goal is to receive 100 per cent of the taxpayers’ money  back but with an additional return,” Hunt said at a news conference.
Hunt was particularly critical of ARENA, saying that grants had been made “without a lot  of follow-up as to whether it’s effective.” Others noted that ARENA had recouped $600 million in projects that had been approved by the Howard and Labor governments but did not look promising.
Still, it appears that the government did not approve of large grants to individual projects that offered no return to the taxpayer.
While technically ARENA will not be “merged”, it will be stripped of all its powers. Its few remaining executives will help assess projects for the new fund, but will not be involved in decision making, which will lie entirely with the CEFC board.

Clean Energy Council CEO Kane Thornton said the move effectively took with one hand and gave with another, by reducing ARENA’s access to capital grants and replacing it with new mechanisms using CEFC’s existing money.
Thornton said the new fund will be able to provide both debt and equity, but the question remained to what extent debt and equity can replace the gap previously filled by grants.
“We are pleased that the CEFC is going to live on, but we are disappointed that the government will press on and reduce the budget for ARENA and its ability to provide capital grants.
“These have been critical to ARENA’s success to date, not only in funding large scale solar projects but also in its significant R&D support.”
Staff within ARENA are believed to be horrified by the changes, particularly the decision to bring a halt to funding to start-up technologies and research. They say the focus on the new fund, and the need for it to get a return on investment, will effectively rule out a whole category of funding requirements.
“How many early stage renewable energy projects out there are in a position to one, pay back the money, and give a return on investment,” said one.
Mark Butler, Labor’s climate change spokesman, said Turnbull was trying to make his government look different to Tony Abbott’s, “but he has failed again.”
He accused Turnbull and Hunt of “hitting renewables at the CSIRO” while giving money for research into ‘health effects of wind farms’, and noted Turnbull continued to support Abbott’s direct action policy, which Turnbull had called” fiscal recklessness on a grand scale.”
“Malcolm Turnbull is a sell out on renewable energy just like he is on climate change,” Butler said. “How can we trust them? No new ideas, no new money, just smoke and mirrors.”
John Grimes, the head of the Australian Solar Council, was even more damming.
“Malcolm Turnbull’s Clean Energy Investment Fund is like an exquisitely decorated Easter Egg. It looks great on the outside, but inside it’s a rotten egg,” he said in statement.
“By its very nature early stage research is speculative.  Almost no projects will be fundable under this model.  This will cut the guts out of renewable innovation in Australia”.

Links

• The argument for divesting from fossil fuels is becoming overwhelming | Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian
• Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation? | Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker
• Is Jonathan Franzen really asking us to shrug off the detruction of our world? | Robert Manne, The Guardian
• Fossil industry faces a perfect political and technological storm | Telegraph.co.uk
• Fossil fuel industry must 'implode' to avoid climate disaster, says top scientist | Guardian
• My Tesla Powerwall: Tales of an early adopter
• How can global CO2 levels soar when emissions are flat?
• Ex ARENA chair says Turnbull risks pushing clean energy innovation overseas
• Australia offered first chance to reserve Tesla Model 3 mass market EV

Mass Extinctions And Climate Change: Why The Speed Of Rising Greenhouse Gases Matters

The Conversation - Katrin Meissner | Kaitlin Alexander

Coral bleaching in March 2016. Rapid rises of greenhouse gases in the past have been linked to major extinctions in the oceans. XL Catlin Seaview Survey

We now know that greenhouse gases are rising faster than at any time since the demise of dinosaurs, and possibly even earlier. According to research published in Nature Geoscience this week, carbon dioxide (CO₂) is being added to the atmosphere at least ten times faster than during a major warming event about 50 million years ago.
We have emitted almost 600 billion tonnes of carbon since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations are now increasing at a rate of 3 parts per million (ppm) per year.
With increasing CO₂ levels, temperatures and ocean acidification also rise, and it is an open question how ecosystems are going to cope under such rapid change.
Coral reefs, our canary in the coal mine, suggest that the present rate of climate change is too fast for many species to adapt: the next widespread extinction event might have already started.
In the past, rapid increases in greenhouse gases have been associated with mass extinctions. It is therefore important to understand how unusual the current rate of atmospheric CO₂ increase is with respect to past climate variability.

Into the ice ages
There is no doubt that atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and global temperatures have changed in the past.
Ice sheets, for example, are reliable book-keepers of ancient climate and can give us an insight into climate conditions long before the thermometer was invented. By drilling holes into ice sheets we can retrieve ice cores and analyse the accumulation of ancient snow, layer upon layer.
These ice cores not only record atmospheric temperatures through time, they also contain frozen bubbles that provide us with small samples of ancient air. Our longest ice core extends more than 800,000 years into the past.
During this time, the Earth oscillated between cold ice ages and warm “interglacials”. To move from an ice age to an interglacial, you need to increase CO₂ by roughly 100 ppm. This increase repeatedly melted several kilometre-thick ice sheets that covered the locations of modern cities like Toronto, Boston, Chicago or Montreal.
With increasing CO₂ levels at the end of the last ice age, temperatures increased too. Some ecosystems could not keep up with the rate of change, resulting in several megafaunal extinctions, although human impacts were almost certainly part of the story.

Nevertheless, the rate of change in CO₂ over the past million years was tame when compared to today. The highest recorded rate of change before the Industrial Revolution is less than 0.15 ppm per year, just one-twentieth of what we are experiencing today.

Temperature has oscillated with greenhouse gases. Kaitlin Alexander, data from: Luthi et al., 2006: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/full/nature06949.html Loulergue et al., 2008: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/full/nature06950.html Etheridge et al., 1996: http://onlinelibr

Looking further back
To find an analogue for present-day climate change, we therefore have to look further back, to a time when ice sheets were small or did not exist at all. Several abrupt warming events occurred between 56 million and 52 million years ago. These events were characterised by a rapid increase in temperature and ocean acidification.
The most prominent of these events was the Palaeocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This event resulted in one of the largest known extinctions of life forms in the deep ocean. Atmospheric temperatures increased by 5-8C within a few thousand years.
Reconstructions of the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere during this event vary between 2000-10,000 billion tonnes of carbon.
The new research, led by Professor Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii, analysed ocean sediments to quantify the lag between warming and changes in the carbon cycle during the PETM.
Although climate archives become less certain the further we look back, the authors found that the carbon release must have been below 1.1 billion tonnes of carbon per year. That is about one-tenth of the rate of today’s carbon emissions from human activities such as burning fossil fuels.

What happens when the brakes are off?
Although the PETM resulted in one of the largest known deep sea extinctions, it is a small event when compared to the five major extinctions in the past.
The Permian-Triassic Boundary extinction, nicknamed “The Great Dying”, wiped out 90% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate families 250 million years ago. Like its four brothers, this extinction event happened a very long time ago. Climate archives going that far back lack the resolution needed to reliably reconstruct rates of change.
There is, however, evidence for extensive volcanic activity during the Great Dying, which would have led to a release of CO₂ as well as the potential release of methane along continental margins. Ocean acidification caused by high atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and acid rain have been put forward as potential killer mechanisms.
Other hypotheses include reduced oxygen in the ocean due to global warming or escape of hydrogen sulfide, which would have caused both direct poisoning and damage to the ozone layer.
These past warming events occurred without human influence. They point to the existence of positive feedbacks within the climate system that have the power to escalate warming dramatically. The thresholds to trigger these feedbacks are hard to predict and their impacts are hard to quantify.
Some examples of feedbacks include the melting of permafrost, the release of methane hydrates from ocean sediments, changes in the ocean carbon cycle, and changes in peatlands and wetlands. All of these processes have the potential to quickly add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Given that these feedbacks were strong enough in the past to wipe out a considerable proportion of life forms on Earth, there is no reason to believe that they won’t be strong enough in the near future, if triggered by sufficiently rapid warming.
Today’s rate of change in atmospheric CO₂ is unprecedented in climate archives. It outpaces the carbon release during the most extreme abrupt warming events in the past 66 million years by at least an order of magnitude.
We are therefore unable to rely upon past records to predict if and how our ecosystems will be able to adapt. We know, however, that mass extinctions have occurred in the past and that these extinctions, at least in the case of the PETM, were triggered by much smaller rates of change.

Links
As carbon dioxide hits a new high, there's still no Planet B
Another link between CO2 and mass extinctions of species
As emissions rise, we may be heading for an ice-free planet
Is another mass extinction event on the way?

Easter Is A Reminder That Climate Change May Be Our Most Deadly Sin

Fairfax - Elizabeth Farrelly

I've never been strong on belief. Sin, virtue, damnation, eternity; none of it has had me altogether persuaded. But one question I can't walk round. Is climate change proof of sin? Not punishment; evidence. Is it final, irreducible proof (for us diehard boneheads) that that the seven deadly sins are exactly that?
Easter bears this question aloft like the sword from the lake. Easter is the loveliest of the religious festivals; nuanced, paradoxical, hauntingly mysterious. It has always been a seasonal turn-point, a "thank god" moment in Australia as temperatures fall back into the realm of the tolerable. But last month's news of a catastrophic climate-change spike – making that thermal relief increasingly improbable – underscores Easter's other role, as a profound and magical moral mnemonic. In short, voodoo.
Our ongoing inertia on climate change suggests that the problem is deep; not at root technical or political but spiritual, a direct consequence of the seven deadly sins run every bit as wild as the carbon we spew into the air. Easter, properly understood, is still the best antidote but its healing powers (since we're in Harry Potter land here) are neutralised by the patriarchal corporation – the church – that holds it captive.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari

Most religious festivals are Shakespearean comedies; simple, upbeat and celebratory. We try to tuck Easter, too, into this bunny-and-chicken basket, a pagan rite of spring accidentally shipped by history to the wrong hemisphere. But Easter belongs in autumn. Easter is very noir.
I mean sure, Easter celebrates life. But it pivots on the paradoxical necessity to life of death. Yes, its dramatic trajectory ends with the return to hope. But its power inheres in the week-long irony-entwisted plunge from hope (the palm-fringed Hosannas) through rejection and humiliation to fathomless despair. Like a Colin McCahon waterfall, the Easter story stores its energy in that straight, bleak, black, vertical drop.
For me it's this, the misery bit, that makes Easter compelling. Eternal life doesn't tempt me. I'm way more interested in this one, and the implied eternity of the planet in our care. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?) The heartbroken cry of the man on the cross gives us Jesus at his most human, and his most here.
The radical openness so revealed, the plea wrenched against a black sky from the torn soul of a dying man, directly opposes the life-diminishing behaviours we once called deadly sins. If we could emulate it, even in small part, this openness would save us and our mothership, Earth.
People argue that Christianity's fatal flaw is making faith alone sufficient for salvation (whatever that is). They say this means you needn't do good; you need only believe. (Here they generally cite Pell, Baird, Abbott, Turnbull.)
But I think that's a misunderstanding. Jesus' radical openness – we're told he "emptied himself … and became obedient to the point of death" – is a Zen thing, like the poetic self-emptying that Keats called negative capability. It's a total trust that makes "sin" impossible.
Why? Because an "empty" self is all subject. Ego is all object, and sin is ego incontinent. Yet if you can even name the sins, it's likely via a 2002 marketing ploy by Magnum ice creams.
Under the tag-line "give in to it", Magnum offered Vanity (champagne), Envy (pistachio), Sloth (caramel), Revenge (raspberry), Greed (tiramisu), Gluttony (double-choc) and Lust (vanilla-strawberry). The church was miffed, but more for misplaced territorial reasons than because it should have been gluttonies 1-to-7.
Sins, after all, are only wisdom codified into portable, foil-wrapped pill-form. The seven deadlies act out our inner spoilt-brat, thus undermining long-term, big-picture wellbeing – such as planetary survival. How does it work?
Lust is the least. Now almost a virtue, a workout, lust is also the least obvious climate contributor, except insofar as it expands the population burden.
Greed (or avarice) is the most obviously implicated, since our insatiable appetite for stuff decimates planetary resources and sends carbon skyrocketing (yet even this is made a virtue by governments intent on economic growth).
Envy is greed's root and enabler. Envy, which makes us self-measure against others' achievements instead of our own evaluated need, is the core of all advertising, most consumption and vast proportion of climate-change.
Gluttony is almost a subset of greed. More people now overeat than under-eat and amputations from diabetes have risen (in NSW) 25 per cent in two years, yet still we genetically engineer broccoli to increase sugar content. Gluttony exacerbates climate-change by the growing, the transport, the food-science, the cooking and the tsunami-like consequences for health.
Those are sins of desire; sins, if you like, of commission. The rest – sloth, wrath and pride – incline us to boneheadedness, inuring us to exigencies that would otherwise drive change.
Wrath (anger, revenge) is the direct opposite of love or radical openness, making us close our hearts to humans and planet, both. Sloth seems innocent. Lying round in trackies? Pretty harmless, right? But its our persistent inaction on climate change that shows sins of omission are still sins.
Pride is the most interesting sin; ambiguous, insidious, destructive. Like lust, pride has become a virtue – I'm gay/black/racist/right-wing/fat and proud of it. But pride also lets us set ourselves above nature, seeing her as our plaything and our tool.
We all have our defining sin. Mine is mainly envy, with a touch of greed. But corporations also sin, and the church's sin is pride.
Many see pride (or hubris) as inherent in the shift from pantheism to monotheism: one god stands above the world, whereas many gods were embedded. But the church, with its chosen people-ism, its patriarchal rigidity, its systemic refusal to care properly for children, women or nature, has trapped Jesus inside a rigid cage of judgment, hypocrisy and cliche.
It makes you wonder. Perhaps, when the crowd welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem with Hosanna! (meaning Liberate us! Save us!) what they meant was: Please. Open our hard hearts! Fill us with radical empty. Save our lovely planet from the boofheads.

New CSIRO Document Reveals Scale Of Planned Cuts To Climate Programs

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

One of CSIRO's main climate science units planned to slash four out of five researchers, all but eliminating its monitoring and climate modelling research, a new document reveals.
The cuts are contained in an analysis for the Oceans & Atmosphere division, dated January 25, 2016. CSIRO handed over the document to the Senate committee investigating plans to slash 350 staff overall, and it has been made public on the Senate's website.

Larry Marshall, chief executive of CSIRO, is trying to shed 350 jobs, including many climate researchers. Photo: Pat Scala

Doubts over the rationale and planning of the cuts flared on Tuesday in another CSIRO section facing deep job losses, with many Land & Water staff walking out of a meeting with chief executive Larry Marshall.
"People got fed up of having their questions marginalised, trivialised, and with being lied to," one senior researcher told Fairfax media. He added that about half those attending walked out, with division's head, Paul Hardisty, among them.
"We understand CSIRO scientists are passionate about their science and also about some of the changes to the structure of their organisation," a CSIRO spokesman said, declining to elaborate on the meeting. "CSIRO is committed to continuing to have open and transparent dialogue with staff and hearing staff views and concerns."

Stocking 40 years of gas samples from Cape Grim, at CSIRO's Aspendale centre. Photo: Supplied

The new document, though, highlights the extent of the original cuts being considered by CSIRO before pressure – including from thousands of international scientists – prompted a scaling back of the job losses.
The Earth System Assessment unit – which includes the climate models used by the Bureau of Meteorology and the team analysing greenhouse and other gases at Tasmania's Cape Grim research station – was to have its 81-strong staff slashed to 16, the analysis shows.
The remaining tally included as many as six post-doctoral researchers, and would have left just the aerosols and air-quality teams, Fairfax Media has been told.
The Oceans & Climate Dynamics unit, which includes sea-level research and ocean observations, was to lose 31 of its 71 staff, the document shows.
"Some long-standing government clients will be impacted by this realignment," the document cites as among the "key risks" of the plan. "This will require some management given that we are electing to make these changes rather than [be] forced by government funding changes."
A spokesman for CSIRO said the organisation stood by comments made by executives including Dr Marshall to Senate estimates. These include an estimate that half of the 140 staff in the main climate units would be retained.
The document "only partly" reflects the situation and that conversations had been many and are ongoing, the spokesman said.
Greens Senator Janet Rice, however, said the document reveals the original plan, "and they've been back-pedalling ever since".
"Not only did they not have any consultation with the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian Antarctic Division [and other agencies], they had no idea of the impacts," Senator Rice said.
The analysis also omitted from the list of risks the contribution that would be lost to international science and the value to the Australian economy of being able to predict climate change, she said.
Dr Marshall has said CSIRO plans to hire 350 new staff over the next two years to tap new growth areas. These sectors include climate mitigation – or cutting carbon emissions – and adapting to the climate changes that are inevitable.
Scientists, though, have told the Senate committee investigating the CSIRO that adaptation work would be much harder to do unless Australia is able to predict the rate of change and where its impacts will hit the hardest.
The document shows the net reduction in full-time staff in the O&A division would save just $6.5 million a year. That calculation was based on $8.8 million in salaries and $2.7 million in lower operating costs, with the gains set against $5 million in lost revenue.
"It's a pretty bad deal – you cut about 110 staff all together and you recover almost nothing," one senior scientist told Fairfax Media. "You also ruin the reputation [of CSIRO] and the lives" of the staff let go.
Dr Marshall is expected to be grilled on the document when he fronts the Senate committee, now planned for April 7.

Links

• How Fairfax Media broke news of the cuts
• CSIRO pares back climate cuts
• Grim prospects: the shake-up of Australia's climate science